If you're just getting started with Perl, this is the book you want—whether you're a programmer, system administrator, or web hacker. Nicknamed "the Llama" by two generations of users, this bestseller closely follows the popular introductory Perl course taught by the authors since 1991. This 6th edition covers recent changes to the language up to version 5.14.

Perl is suitable for almost any task on almost any platform, from short fixes to complete web applications. Learning Perl teaches you the basics and shows you how to write programs up to 128 lines long—roughly the size of 90% of the Perl programs in use today. Each chapter includes exercises to help you practice what you've just learned. Other books may teach you to program in Perl, but this book will turn you into a Perl programmer.

Randal L. Schwartz

Randal L. Schwartz is a two-decade veteran of the software industry. He is skilled in software design, system administration, security, technical writing, and training. Randal has coauthored the "must-have" standards: Programming Perl, Learning Perl, Learning Perl for Win32 Systems, and Effective Perl Learning, and is a regular columnist for WebTechniques, PerformanceComputing, SysAdmin, and Linux magazines.

He is also a frequent contributor to the Perl newsgroups, and has moderated comp.lang.perl.announce since its inception. His offbeat humor and technical mastery have reached legendary proportions worldwide (but he probably started some of those legends himself). Randal's desire to give back to the Perl community inspired him to help create and provide initial funding for The Perl Institute. He is also a founding board member of the Perl Mongers (perl.org), the worldwide Perl grassroots advocacy organization. Since 1985, Randal has owned and operated Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc. Randal can be reached for comment at merlyn@stonehenge.com or (503) 777-0095, and welcomes questions on Perl and other related topics.

brian d foy

brian d foy is a prolific Perl trainer and writer, and runs The Perl Review to help people use and understand Perl through educational, consulting, code review, and more. He's a frequent speaker at Perl conferences. He's the co-author of Learning Perl, Intermediate Perl, and Effective Perl Programming, and the author of Mastering Perl. He was been an instructor and author for Stonehenge Consulting Services from 1998 to 2009, a Perl user since he was a physics graduate student, and a die-hard Mac user since he first owned a computer. He founded the first Perl user group, the New York Perl Mongers, as well as the Perl advocacy nonprofit Perl Mongers, Inc., which helped form more than 200 Perl user groups across the globe. He maintains the perlfaq portions of the core Perl documentation, several modules on CPAN, and some stand-alone scripts.

Tom Phoenix

Tom Phoenix has been working in the field of education since 1982. After more than thirteen years of dissections, explosions, work with interesting animals, and high-voltage sparks during his work at a science museum, he started teaching Perl classes for Stonehenge Consulting Services, where he's worked since 1996. Since then, he has traveled to many interesting locations, so you might see him soon at a Perl Mongers' meeting. When he has time, he answers questions on Usenet's comp.lang.perl.misc and comp.lang.perl.moderated newsgroups, and contributes to the development and usefulness of Perl. Besides his work with Perl, Perl hackers, and related topics, Tom spends his time on amateur cryptography and speaking Esperanto. His home is in Portland, Oregon.

The animal on the cover of Learning Perl, FifthEdition, is a llama (Lama glama), a relation of thecamel, and native to the Andean range. Also included in this llamoid groupis the domestic alpaca and their wild ancestors, the guanaco and the vicuña.Bones found in ancient human settlements suggest that domestication of thealpaca and the llama dates back about 4,500 years. In 1531, when Spanishconquistadors overran the Inca Empire in the high Andes, they found bothanimals present in great numbers. These llamas are suited for high mountainlife; their hemoglobin can take in more oxygen than that of other mammals.Llamas can weigh up to 300 pounds and are mostly used as beasts ofburden. A pack train may contain several hundred animals and can travel upto 20 miles per day. Llamas will carry loads up to 50 pounds, but have atendency to be short-tempered and resort to spitting and biting todemonstrate displeasure. To other people of the Andes, llamas also providemeat, wool for clothing, hides for leather, and fat for candles. Their woolcan also be braided into ropes and rugs, and their dried dung is used forfuel.The cover image is a 19th-century engraving from the Dover PictorialArchive.

I had to switch to Perl from other scripting languages because of the new job I found. Was recommended this book by one of the colleagues and it worth every penny: by the end of the book I was able to read other coders perl code and implement my tasks and it hasn't take more than a week to read it through.

If you want to learn Perl, this is the easiest way. My technique for using it is to complete one chapter at a time, reading the text then completing the exercises. As an E-book, you can put highlights in it then search for them when you are trying to remember "where did they explain such and such?". It's a structured learning course and gives you a great grounding in the language which allows you solve do a great number of commonly-encountered problems. I love this book and would always have the latest version available.

I have programmed in Python and a little bit in C and I think this book is great - and so is perl. I already knew a little bit about perl from reading a Wikipedia article and looking at the perldoc documentation, but Learning Perl taught my some very useful things that I would have never found alone (splicing, nongreedy regexes, just to name a few).

perl has amazing support for I/O, and the book helped me understand regexes and file I/O. I found both perl and this book to be good for other things, too. I wrote a logging program that wrote logs with timestamps, for example. Other things I used this book and perl for included a calculator, a text-to-HTML conversion program, and a password cracker.

Learning Perl helped me uncover some bugs in my programs, taught me many new things, and was also just a fun read. The only thing I would add would be more about OOP (Object Oriented Programming).

I found the TOC (Table of Contents) to be very well done and the e-book version had links to the proper sections. I could find anything quite quickly with the excellent TOC.

I am not a programmer. I happen to love programming. Weird, right? I had no experience other than a little linux command line and some high level bash and ksh. I have learned so much and was able to write a rather simple journal program from just my reading the first 5 chapters of this book. I would say if you are a "programmer" by trade, this book would do great as a stand alone introduction. I really do not have any complaints.

I bought it because I'd always heard that if you want to learn Perl, you read the Llama book and then the Camel book. By the end of both, you'll have your feet under you where Perl is concerned.

As good as the book is, and as true as the recommendations are, I feel that it's more for a lack of competition than because this book excels. The authors, editors, and everyone else involved really need to consider addressing their ADD issues with ritalin or adderall. The explanations are clear and great... once you've waded through the jokes, footnotes, excerpts from this one time in college, etc.

In my opinion this book is the best one to get you started with Perl programming. It doesn't end with the basis, it also teaches you in-depth. It helped me write Perl programs in a very short time. Regular expressions chapters are in detail which helped me in data processing programs. Exercises at the end of each chapter gave an opportunity for practicing before writing real programs. Now this book is my handy book.

Assuming no prior experience and Learning PERL provides approachable, and well explained hands-on examples, starting from installation of PERL on Windows, OSX or Linux-based systems. Much like the superb cookbook series of volumes from O'Reilly it approaches instruction in PERL from a hands-on specific task that you would want to accomplish way of instruction, that is is of particular value to those that appreciate self-paced instruction.This book takes the learner to a solid level of competence in PERL and a stage to carry out many useful tasks is areas such as text processing or database manipulation. It will be useful to those with no programming experience and a need to carry out automated tasks for their own use as well as people familiar with Python or PHP requiring a rapid introduction to a different approach to similar programmatic structures.

Whether you are a sysadmin, developer, hacker or just a plain geek, chances are someday you will be confronted with Perl. The feature-rich language can be daunting to the novice, which is why it is a good idea to have a well-written reference book and guide close by. This book is both, but it is much more than just that. The author explains the very basics of the language, its history and philosophy, and clear examples are sprinkled generously within the pages. The chapters are well thought out, and also serves as a reference if you are looking for a cookbook-method to find the solution to a tricky problem, but it is also pleasant to be able to read through from start to end.

Don't be fooled by the title; this book does indeed teach you the basics about Perl, but it also goes well beyond the simple "learning" aspect, and takes you deep into the language.